As the development of software applications evolves, programming accurate and efficient code has become a real challenge. A typical software application interfaces with different modules, e.g., using APIs, and should be programmed to enable its execution on different platforms and operating systems. For example, a software application (app) should be available for execution over different types of operating systems, such as Linux®, Mac OS® and Windows®. Furthermore, as execution of most software applications have been migrated to cloud computing infrastructures, the code should be written such that its execution is supported by any computing environments in the cloud infrastructure. Thus, in sum, the complexity of software applications imposes a real challenge on programmers.
In order to enable the development of rapid creation, setup, and deployment of applications, resources that include “off-the-shelf” functions, algorithms, and pieces of codes are available. Such resources range from academic and scientific publications to code repositories (e.g., GitHub). However, such resources are limited as they cannot provide executable code that can be easily evaluated and integrated in a software application or project being researched or developed. For example, a scientific publication (e.g., in an IEEE® article) would include a textual description of an algorithm or at best its pseudo code.
In most cases, scientific publications do not include any code that can be immediately executed on a computing environment for which the software application is developed. Thus, to evaluate the functionality and performance of the algorithm, executable code should be written and tested on that computing environment. This is a time consuming and error prone task. At best, a scientific publication would include a link to code repository that provides a sample code. However, this would still require the programmer to integrate the code in a software program for further evaluation.
Furthermore, due to the voluminous amount of academic and scientific publications, open-source codes, and other algorithm resources, it is almost impossible to effectively search for the right algorithm that would fit into a software application and would perform an intended function.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the deficiencies noted above.